One of eight people charged in what Ontario Provincial Police say is the largest art fraud investigation in Canadian history is expected to be sentenced Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Thunder Bay, Ont.
Gary Lamont pleaded guilty on Dec. 4 to a charge of making false documents, mainly artwork, that was attributed to Morrisseau and a count of defrauding the public in an amount exceeding $5,000.
Lamont oversaw the production and distribution of hundreds of forged artworks falsely attributed to Morrisseau starting in 2002, according to the agreed statement of facts submitted to the courts.
According to the statement of facts, 190 “Lamont Ring Forgeries” have been identified to date, with 117 of them seized by investigators.
“To have one of the key figures that we’ve been interested in admit to his guilt in terms of creating fake Morrisseaus, that’s a huge step forward,” said Johnathan Sommer, a lawyer who specializes in art forgery.
It used to be very difficult to convince police and courts to take art fraud seriously, said Sommer.
“They treat it almost like an amusing spectacle, you know, a tale of charming rogues that defraud people who have more money than they know what to do with,” he said. “There’s a lot of really ugly criminality that’s connected with this art fraud, Sommer said.”
Sommer estimates there are significantly more fraudulent works in circulation than genuine Morrisseau paintings.
“It severely muddied his legacy,” he said. “They undermine the relationship between viewers of the art and who Morrisseau really was.”
“There is likely at least another 5,000 fraudulent artworks out there, ” said Cory Dingle, executive director of Norval Morrisseau’s estate. “The real battle hasn’t even started.”
Morrisseau’s estate faces an expensive and fraught task — finding, investigating and denouncing the thousands of fake works to preserve Morrisseau’s authentic legacy.
Norval Morrisseau as artist-in-residence in the Thomson Shack at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg, Ont., on July 11, 1979. (Ian Samson/McMichael Canadian Art Collection Archives)
The sheer volume of fakes to identify combined with the difficulty of legally proving them as inauthentic is an undue burden for the estate to bear, said Dingle.
“Canada really needs to have a federal arts-fraud division, because truly we are talking about our culture and our heritage that is being defrauded,” he said.
Some other countries allow police to work with artist’s estates to identify and destroy fake paintings, said Dingle.
“That’s how they clean up their market. Right now, Canada has no mechanism such as that.”
The other seven people allegedly involved in the art fraud ring are also expected to appear in court Thursday.
Diane Marie Champagne, Benjamin Paul Morrisseau, Linda Joy Tkachyk and David John Voss will be in court in Thunder Bay.
Also charged are Jeffrey Gordon Cowan of Niagara-on-the-Lake, James (Jim) White of Essa Township and David P. Bremner of Locust Hill. They will be appearing in Barrie for pre-trial.
A legacy diminished, but not destroyed
As the founder of Woodlands style art, Morrisseau’s influence is so pervasive that the impact of the fraud reverberates throughout the Indigenous art scene, said art gallery owner Sophia Lebessis, who is Inuk.
“You’re filled with rage and disappointment on a cultural level because it’s like, here’s another aspect of our lives that are just taken over and destroyed,” said Lebessis, who owns Transformation Fine Art, a Calgary-based gallery of Inuit and First Nations art.
While fraudsters have damaged Morrisseau’s legacy, Lebessis said they can’t take away the positive impact his art has on the people who view it.
“What these criminals are not going to take away from us is that magical moment when you’re walking into a gallery or you’re walking into a museum and you’re seeing a Morrisseau for your very first time,” said Lebessis,
“That feeling that you felt, and all of a sudden your worldview changes, of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people. All of a sudden you’re connected to this master artist who you might never have met.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
